Holiness Will Come
It may be that we’re not supposed to have favorite prophets, but I do. Isaiah speaks to me, Moses is my dude, but Alma the younger is probably the one I want to talk to most.
After a youth of moral experimentation and rebellion, Alma had one of those (literally) earth-shaking encounters with divinity. God moves in mysterious ways, like, in Alma’s case, a temporary coma in which he came to know mercy. Afterward, he became a missionary. In one particularly wicked city, he encountered Amulek, a lapsed man of God, who fed him and began preaching with him.
If you’re familiar with scripture (this one or others), then it won’t surprise you that this didn’t go over well. All the people who came to know God through Alma and Amulek’s teachings were eventually cast out or burned alive. It was horrendous in ways that the sparse details of the scripture allow us to skip over—the screams and the smell of burning flesh of people you know and love, the flames lit by your neighbors. This is the kind of thing that leaves soul scars, the the kind of thing that wakes you up years later, sweating and shaking.
Amulek was a new disciple, but his hope was strong. He’d seen the goodness and power and healing of God; he knew He was mighty to save. So he turned to Alma and said, “Let’s save them. We can’t watch this, and we have God with us, let’s save them” (Alma 14:10).
But Alma shook his head. “We can’t. The Spirit is saying no—these women and children are with God now, and we’re not going to take them away” (Alma 14:11).
Then Amulek was afraid. Amulek hadn’t known before how strong God’s restraint was, how willing He was to let his children exercise agency, even when His children’s agency absolutely sucked. These people were dying, and Amulek understood that he might too. His past with God stopped looking like His future, and he didn’t know what to do.
But Alma did. Alma’s faith and hope was different. He was an old, worn out disciple. He’d given up his place in government after seeing how far people had strayed from God, and he’d walked among wickedness. He knew that God could save—but he also knew that He doesn’t always. Alma had had to rebuild his understanding of God before, so His faith still knew how to look forward. “We might die,” he said, “But I don’t think so. We still have work to do.” Alma knew that, even in this kind of pain, holiness was still coming. Deliverance could have meant death, but, for them, it was going to mean freedom.
Alma was right. Alma and Amulek were sent to prison where they were beaten, starved, and eventually delivered, just like Alma said they would be.
This is not a simple story. Afterward Alma took Amulek back to his own home “and did administer unto him in his tribulations, and strengthened him in the Lord” (Alma 15:18). I imagine that, even after seeing an angel and being delivered by an earthquake, even after seeing that God is mighty to save, Amulek’s faith was hurt and his soul was wounded. He had to ask himself whether he would follow a God who allowed those children to become ash and smoke.
It’s a good question, one I think we have to answer if we’re going to be the kind of servants Alma was, the kind who know their God.
Rabbi Benay Lappe says that we all have a master story. This master story is how we answer the Big Questions: Who am I and how does that relate to who you are? Where do I belong? What’s the point? As long as our master story is working, we don’t even know we have it. This story is constituted the assumptions we carry with us. But eventually, she says, this story, like all others, will crash. Something will challenge it, and we won’t know what to do.
There are three ways we can respond, she says. 1. We can deny the crash. This is the route a lot of people took with evolution and the discovery of dinosaur fossils. "It’s not true!” they went around saying, because these massive bones stretched their understanding of creation. “They’re fake and they always will be!” 2. We can deny our master story. This is how a lot of other people responded to fossils. This is where secularism comes from—”Religion is fake and always has been!”
It is, of course, the third option that both I and the good Rabbi like best. In this third option, you sit in cognitive dissonance. You deny neither the crash nor the story; you allow the crash to modify your idea of the story. This is what Amulek had to do. God is good. God is mighty to save. God loves us. God also lets us burn sometimes. He lets his children inflict terrible, terrible pain upon each other. How can both these things be true?
I wear silver cross around my neck these days to remind myself that God saves but also sometimes he doesn’t. Holiness is always coming, but sometimes it is much later than I expected. Like the scriptural groom or thief in the night, it sneaks up on me. When I’ve been in darkness a long time, light starts to feel more like an idea than a reality. I wear the cross to remind myself that following God doesn’t mean that things go well—Jesus, who did it perfectly, suffered worse than anyone.
I want to have the kind of faith that knows how to look forward, even when I find out, once again, that I misunderstood who God is and what He does. I want this faith for me, because I can imagine it brings a different kind of peace than the one I catch glimpses of now and then. But I also want it for the people around me, so that when they find out how much God is willing to let them hurt, I can administer to them and strengthen them. I can say, “I don’t know how, but God is still good, and still loves you, and there is a way through this.”
This is why I want to talk to Alma. He’d crashed so many times, he knew how to do it. Like ice skaters and gymnasts, he knew how to fall. His hope was firm enough to put weight on, so he could allow others to lean on his faith when they were still finding their way back to theirs.